Tag: Shima Yashiki

BL Awards Light: The ChillChill BL Character General Election!

~ ames ~ 1 Comment

If you follow a lot of BL artists and publishers, there’s a good chance you’ve been seeing the #BLキャラ総選挙2024 hashtag floating around Twitter over the last couple weeks, along with little profiles of BL characters belonging to the artist or publisher. When I first started seeing them about a week and a half ago, I initially assumed it was just a fun new Twitter trend among mangaka, but boy was I wrong (and also super behind on commercial BL news—I guess you can really tell the Renta! office has been super busy these last couple months).

BLキャラ総選挙2024, or the “2024 BL Character General Election,” is another effort by the wonderful BL site ChillChill to spread the love for commercial BL. It was initially announced in early May with the following blurb (loosely translated by yours truly):

For the amazing commercial BL characters who make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside!

This BL election was brought forth in order to shine a spotlight on those wonderful BL characters, spread the love of the BL series they’re from, and introduce new stories to an even wider audience!

This is really interesting, since the ChillChill BL Awards already used to have a seme/uke character section. So in this BLog post I’ll give a brief rundown of the ChillChill BL Awards character ranking history, before showcasing the BL characters whose stories you can read on Renta!, how to vote, and a little chatter about some of my personal Best Boys.

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The good, the dark and the gritty: omegaverse

~ Admin ~ Leave a comment

Blooming cherry blossoms be damned, Japan has been in a rainy mood lately. It’s probably the kind of situation when most people would like to indulge in something uplifting, like a comedy or happy song; but, if you’re anything like me, you prefer to consume media that affirm the rainy season tenfold. That’s sometimes the appeal of sad, dark stories, after all. Which is why this humble purveyor of angst embarked on another exploration through the Renta! catalog, not to find our many cute, sweet, domestic, sexy omegaverse manga, but the stuff that shows people utterly under the thumb of a society governed by biological urges.

Which means of course, here’s a hefty content warning for the most ruthless things omegaverse might offer—if you’re looking for something to scatter the rainclouds rather than darken them, how about Sou’s April Fool’s post?

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A foray into angsty omegaverse: Shima Yashiki’s “This Poor Beta Doesn’t Know About Love”

~ Admin ~ 3 Comments

With the forces that decide which manga I get to check each month being out of my control (and fully in the hands of the team project coordinator), Shima Yashiki’s incredibly angsty and sexy “This Poor Beta Doesn’t Know About Love” (Awarena Betaha Koio Shiranai) appeared on my laptop screen at work quite unexpectedly.

Up until this story, I had never read omegaverse once (yet, after this, I also got to enjoy a certain fox-and-mouse romance), so this was a wholly new experience at that time. Obviously, as a twenty-something that spends most of her time online, I’m familiar with the concept, but not the nitty-gritty of it, you know? So, a couple of comprehensive guides later, I rolled up my sleeves and was ready to dive into this manga—to discover the perfect BL about fictional mind-games and emotional edging (maybe even the physical kind, too).

Continue reading “A foray into angsty omegaverse: Shima Yashiki’s “This Poor Beta Doesn’t Know About Love”” →